Friday, May 30, 2008

My Friend Nick was quoted on Streetsblog. He's very excited about it. I'm impressed too. We're all clearly a bit nerdy over here. The piece is about parking garages in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Here is Nick's juicy bit:

"...The Department of City Planning doesn't seem to take seriously the fact that parking generates traffic," says Nick Peterson, a vice president at planning firm Alex Garvin & Associates, "but if a new garage opens on a block that provides a net increase of 200 parking spaces, that's 200 cars that weren't there before. It's pretty obvious that new cars are on the road as a result." As for the pedestrian environment, he adds, "A parking garage is a dead space along the sidewalk -- there is no reason to go in and out of a parking garage except to park or pick up your car."

To guide local policymakers and help promote a sustainable quality of life, the Montgomery County Planning Board, in partnership with the County Executive, is launching a project to develop overall environmental policy goals and set indicators measuring progress toward meeting those goals.

Join the Planning Board and the County Executive at a Healthy and Sustainable Communities Workshop, June 25-26 at the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville, MD. (Shuttle to/from Metro Red Line provided.) Download the workshop save-the-date flyer Let us know you're coming! Please RSVP. The Workshop is co-sponsored by the Montgomery County Planning Board and the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection.

Details, including the information above, are here. Of course, they use different photos in their marketing material...

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Friday, May 9, 2008

I'd been wanting this book for a while, but hadn't gotten around to it. It was my birthday last week, and some good friends gave it to me. It's good. And very well written. And it's making me happy. Just now, I'd forgotten the author's name, so I was looking for it on-the-line, and came across these books that looked interesting:

And then I saw this:

New Orleans Bicycles

By Nicholas Costarides and Mary Richardson,

with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu

A portion of the proceeds go to a New Orleans community bike project. I ordered it immediately at great independent bookstore, Politics & Prose. We should all try to buy our books and music from local retailers, as long as they offer good products and services. Here is the publisher's description of New Orleans Bicycles:

New Orleans will forever exist in a post-Hurricane Katrina context. New Orleans' Bicycles features over 100 colorful and detailed photographs taken eighteen months prior to the disaster. Thought some of the bikes look as if they would crumble under the weight of a rider, and others have the carefully considered accouterments of an art object, every bike in the book was used on a daily basis. These photographs, and the accompanying text that lyrically meditates on the significance of the images, show the side of New Orleans that most visitors never saw. It is the power of these bikes scattered throughout the decaying landscape of New Orleans that attracted the authors to shoot these photographs. Naturally, the photographs depict how things were given the time they were taken. It is impossible to predict what the future will bring for New Orleans, and New Orleans' Bicycles does not claim to address how the city has changed. What it creates, however, is nostalgia for how the city was prior to the hurricane, and hope for those ways to return. A portion of the proceeds from sales will go to a New Orleans community bike project.